It was pretty threatening when Charles Cleary broached the idea of using an outside coach as a change agent in his region of AT&T's Growth Markets sales organization. Rosemary Turner Slade Lucerne remembers it well. Cleary was a vice president and general manager in Growth Markets and new to AT&T; she was the staffing and training manager and an 11-year veteran. "My first reaction was to say, 'Chip, we don't do that. It's not part of our training curriculum. It's not on our intranet. We don't have the budget. We can't,' " she recalls. But Cleary had spent the better part of the prior decade at Teleport Communications Group, a telecom maverick acquired by AT&T. He'd come from a nimble, entrepreneurial culture and knew that was what he needed to somehow graft onto AT&T, to make his region a truly high-growth sales unit. "If AT&T and I both spoke languages, it was speaking French and I was speaking Spanish," he recalls. "I knew what I had to make happen at AT&T. And I knew the road would not be smooth," he says. He enlisted the help of Cheryl Weir, an executive coach who had spent 13 years in sales at IBM.

In one of their early conversations, Weir asked Cleary, "Where do you want to end up at the end of the year?" He told her "something pretty loosey-goosey" like that he wanted to be No. 1. "Well, quantify that," she insisted. When he told her 5% over his revenue target, she replied, "Ahhh, you can do that in your sleep." What would constitute hypergrowth? she wanted to know. Fifteen percent? She nudged: Why don't you aim for 20? (That's big, Cleary says, about double the rate of his piece of the industry.) "She made me put a stake in the ground," recalls Cleary. "This team was not used to putting stakes in the ground."

Cleary brought Weir into the office for a couple of days of intensive training with the staff. "We got into a room and locked ourselves down," Cleary recalls. They talked about their bad habits and what they were really like at home with their families, and they confessed their workplace failings--things like, "Well, I don't spend any time with my people. Or, when they come into my office, I say yeah, yeah, yeah, boom," says Cleary. At some point Cleary gave an impassioned speech, and they all agreed on a sales target (the consensus was to boost revenues by 16%, which would be about double the prior year's growth rate) and began to plot how they'd pull it off.

By year's end, revenue growth was 16%. That put Cleary's outfit in the top three fastest-growing in AT&T's Growth Markets. "We blew out the numbers," he says. "Cheryl accelerated our transformation, no question about it." In January, Cleary was lured away by a job as chief operating officer of Log On America. But by that time, Lucerne had long since been won over. The whole package cost $11,000 for two days of training plus about $2,000 quarterly for follow-up coaching with Weir, "and I honestly think we earned that back in a week," says Lucerne. Weir is continuing her work at AT&T with Cleary's group and four others, and will be coaching at Log On America as well.

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